ИСТИНА

The vital role of metaphor in science is largely undisputed nowadays (Johnson, 2010; Herrmann, 2013) for it offers inside on how new ideas emerge, how they are transformed with advances in knowledge and how they are thus explained and disseminated in papers and monographs. It appears to be essential not only in showing emotional content, but also in explaining and thus fulfilling the generally assumed function of academic discourse as giving information. Since “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff, Johnson, 1980, p. 5), it amounts to a tool for clarifying, elucidating and simplifying the complicated abstract concepts of science. The metaphor identifying procedure works on two main levels: the linguistic and the conceptual one, where source and target domains are distinguished. The source domains for scientific metaphors are many, but when we deal with more complex ideas serving the basis for the source domain associated with cultural knowledge, the fully-fledged conceptual analysis becomes essential. Recent works in cognitive linguistics argue the significant role of broad cultural knowledge being stored and structured in various culturally specific concepts (Komova 2005, 2013). Consequently, the concepts like Trojan Horse and Rosetta Stone pertaining to general cultural knowledge when used metaphorically in scientific discourse still retain much of their original conceptual content. The analysis of the corpus data shows that although this content is quite broad and more or less structured according to the zones of core and periphery, one conceptual feature is usually brought to the limelight in a particular stretch of discourse. This dominant evokes mental representations of the cultural content acting like a key to the piece of discourse and determining the meaning of the set of phrases in the text e.g: Molecular Trojan Horses are brain transport vectors; proteins would not be the Rosetta Stone for unraveling the true secret of life. Understanding complicated metaphors in science with source domains of the kind in terms of a concept with the identified core and periphery zones opens up new possibilities for the analysis of target domains being no less complicated. Moreover, outlining the conceptual dominant within the concept structure helps to predict the development of metaphor in late 19 and 20th centuries. Therefore, we put forward that cultural knowledge represented by metaphors in scientific discourse should be approached from a broad cognitive linguistic perspective, especially investigating the conceptual structure. We also stress that given the growing role of metaphor in science the cultural component in teaching ESP should not be dismissed.